[Oberon] BB Kernel Size

[jan verhoeven]

Op Saturday 21 January 2006 00:20 schreef Jack Johnson:

 > On 1/20/06, Paul Reed <paulreed at paddedcell.com> wrote:
 > > out with the bathwater again - I think that BB's drift
 > > towards self-inflicted complexity* is, to say the least,
 > > disappointing...
 >
 > No intentional slur on the BB development team, but sometimes I think
 > the general trend in complexity among nearly all systems comes from
 > the evolving complexity in object-oriented programming.  

Oberon is my main interest. And Oberon is the name of this mailinglist. 
Bluebottle is, like WinAOS, LinAOS and the lot, a nice exercise for showing 
what can be done with Oberon. 
But I regard it a pity that Oberon itself is not developped any further. 
Today I happened to read an article by Andy Tanebaum who teaches in 
Amsterdam. He still uses his Minix in his lectures and I think it's still 
being fine tuned. Something similar should have happened to Oberon.

The fork in the road leading to Bluebottle and its successors, should have 
been a fork, so TWO evolving paths. Not one path (which now looks like an 
american Interstate Highway) plus one dead end.
BlueBottle cannot compete with Windows or Linux. It cannot even compete 
with QNX, DOS or Menuet. It's nice. It's powerful. It's fun to watch and to 
use, but it's just another system too big to fully understand by one 
slightly smarter than average person.

Oberon still has a lot of potential. It still is one of the very few 
operating environments that CAN be understood by one slightly smarter than 
average individual (given enough time and a fast internet connection).

Please continue with BB, WinAOS, LinAOS or whatever. But also: don't waste 
Native Oberon. 

I want to get Oberon0 running on an extended Nintendo Gameboy Color. I 
borrow the computing engine of the GBC (8 MHz Z80 clone, 32 KB RAM) and add 
features to make it a real microcontroller. In the sense of Niklaus Wirth: 
a system small enough so that everyone is able to understand it's workings.

For those interested: http://fruttenboel.verhoeven272.nl/Gameboy

I'm still just taking apart the Gameboy and adding new hardware. The 
compiler will follow.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten

Jan Verhoeven
http://fruttenboel.verhoeven272.nl